The Bad: Not many RPG elements, pretty short, fights can be too hard, not enough action

Tin Man Games does a great job bringing RPG books to phones and tablets, and Trial of the Clone is one of my favorites story wise. The game is full of fun mature humor and slapstick goodness. You play as a man who is a clone and must use The Goodsider or Evil side to help the President and Vice President. The story isn’t very deep, but the puns and references to Star Wars will make you laugh.

The game is just like any other Tin Man Games book and you will be right at home. Read the passage, choose your direction and go from there. The best part about these books is that each path is a mystery. You will get to a scene where you are at a fork in the road and one path could lead to death and the other to succeed. Even better one could lead to a normal outcome while another leads to an item or special bonuses. I love how Trial of the Clone uses this in a funny way. Your character is really dumb and clumsy and the unluckiest things happen to him. He will try to do the right thing but it always goes wrong in some way. One scene had the Clone lose 50 charisma, think about it, gain it back, realize something else, lose it again, then gain it back (I won’t spoil the exact passage) to end up with the same amount of charisma. Most RPG’s don’t do this and this is what makes the game so fun.

However, this book doesn’t really have RPG elements like other adventure novels. There aren’t even that many items to keep track of in the game, honestly I only ran across 2 health packs in the whole game. There isn’t much fighting to be done, but when you do fight it’s tough. Instead of dying you spin numbers from 0-3 and this will add that much to your fight stat. I wish it would have been dead, because some fights are extremely tough and they required me to restart an act and change paths. I found this a bit frustrating, but the novel is short so you won’t need to spend over 30 minutes trying to get back to where you were.

When you finish the book you can go back and try new paths, but I was already satisfied with the first ending. I love the story and how everything is just so silly and cartoonish, it’s nice to play a lighthearted adventure novel for once. I really hope new novels follow this series because there is something really special here. Maybe a longer story and some deeper RPG elements can make a Trial of the Clone sequel that much better.